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The Uses of History. 



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DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



New York Historical Society 



EIGH T Y-FIF TH A NNI VERSA R V, 



Thursday, November 21, 1889, 



THE REV. JOHN HALL, D.D, 




NEM/ YORK: 
PRINTED FOR THE SOCIETY, 

1889. 



The Uses of History. 



2ln 2l^^)rcs0 

DELIVERED BEFORE THE 

New York Historical Society 

ON ITS 

EIGHTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY, 
Thursday, November 21, 1889, 

BY / 

THE REV. JOHN HALL, D.D. 




MM so J 890 



NEW YORK: 

PRINTED FOR THE SOCIETY. 

1889. 



Officers of the Society, 1889 



PRESIDENT, 

JOHN ALSOP KING. 

FIRST VICE-PRESIDENT, 

JOHN A. WEEKES. 

SECOND VICE-PRESIDENT, 

JOHN S. KENNEDY. 

FOREIGN CORRESPONDING SECRETARY, 

JOHN BIGELOW. 

DOMESTIC CORRESPONDING SECRETARY, 

EDWARD F. DE LANCEY 



RECORDING SECRETARY, 

ANDREW WARNER 



TREASURER, 

ROBERT SCHELL 



LIBRARIAN, 

CHARLES ISHAM 



EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE. 



FIRST CLASS — FOR ONE YEAR, ENDING 1890. 

EDWARD F. DE LANCEY, WILLARD PARKER, M.D., 

DANIEL PARISH, Jr. 

SECOND CLASS — FOR TWO YEARS, ENDING 1 89 1. 

BENJAMIN H. FIELD, FREDERIC GALLATIN, 

CHARLES H. RUSSELL, Jr. 

THIRD CLASS FOR THREE YEARS, ENDING 1 892. 

JOHN S. KENNEDY, GEORGE W. VANDERBILT, 

GEORGE H. MOORE, LL.D. 

B'OURTH CLASS — FOR FOUR YEARS, ENDING 1 893. 

JOHN A. WEEKES, JOHN W. C. LEVERIDGE, 

J. PIERPONT MORGAN. 

JOHN A. WEEKES, Chairman, 
DANIEL PARISH, Jr., Secretary. 

[The President, Recording Secretary, Treasurer, and Librarian 
are members, ex-officio, of the Executive Committee,] 



COMMITTEE ON THE FINE ARTS. 

DANIEL HUNTINGTON, JACOB B. MOORE, 

ANDREW WARNER, HENRY C. STURGES, 

JOHN A. WEEKES, GEORGE W. VANDERBILT. 

DANIEL HUNTINGTON, Chairman, 
ANDREW WARNER, Secretary. 

[The President, Librarian, and Chairman of the Executive Com- 
mittee are members, ex-officio, of the Committee on the Fine Arts.] 



PROCEEDINGS. 

At the meeting of the New York Historical Society, held 
in its Hall, on Thursday Evening, November 21, 1889, to celebrate 
the Eighty-fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the Society : 

The proceedings were opened with prayer by the Rev, Thomas 
E. Vermilve, D.D., Senior Minister of the Reformed (Dutch) 
Church. 

The President made some remarks on the progress of the Soci- 
ety and the value of its collections. 

The Anniversary Address was then delivered by the Rev, John 
Hall, D.D,, on "The Uses of History," 

On its conclusion, Mr. Edward F, de Lancev submitted the 
following resolution, which was adopted unanimously : 

Resolved, That the thanks of the Society be presented to the 
Reverend Doctor Hall for the eloquent and learned address 
which he has delivered this evening, and that he be requested to 
furnish a copy for publication, 

A benediction was then pronounced by the Rev. William R. 
Huntington, D.D., Rector of Grace Church. 

The Society then adjourned. 

Extracts from the Minutes : 

Andrew Warner, 

Recording Secretary. 



THE USES OF HISTORY 



It is no small consolation, when one is called to 
a place for which he is conscious of being unfit, to 
be able to fall back on the fact that he did not seek 
it ; that he was put into it by the kindness of friends, 
who may, accordingly, be expected to treat him le- 
niently, and if they have to suffer a little, to say, in 
forbearing fairness, " Well, we have nobody to 
blame for it but ourselves." Of the New York His- 
torical Society, of course, I have — in common with 
my fellow-citizens — heard and read much ; but its 
pleasures and its advantages, absorbing and fixed 
duties put out of my reach. I am not insensible to 
the unmerited honor done me in the present oppor- 
tunity to appear here ; and I am assured that the 
writer of this paper — however it may be with others 
— will be a gainer from the call to give a little atten- 
tion to the topic — The Uses of History. 

When memory was given by the Creative hand 
as one of the powers of the mind, it was evidently 
meant that the past should have to do in the mental 



8 The Uses of History. 

experiences of the present. To the Infinite One, 
past, present, and future make one picture of perfect 
distinctness. The finite man, whose spirit had the 
image of the Infinite, falls immeasurably below this 
capacity; but there is still a lingering vestige of like- 
ness in that we can learn and remember something 
of what is behind us, and in that we cannot help 
wondering, inquiring, hoping, regarding the future. 
The exercise that strengthens this original faculty — 
which reproduces the past, and places it beside the 
living present — is good in itself, provided we keep 
the power, so enlarged, at work on fruitful fields. 
In the careful analysis of the mental powers by Dr. 
Noah Porter we have sense-perception, and con- 
sciousness, making a first presentation of objects to 
the mind. Then we have the representative faculty 
acting (in part without the will), making a second 
presentation of the objects. But will-power comes 
in, and is employed in keeping represented to the 
mind what is desired, and so at once employing and 
strengthening it. Good history furnishes the ma- 
terial on which this representative power can work, 
exercising, in part, other faculties, and so far giving 
vigor, direction, and versatility to that which consti- 
tutes the man. For what is history ? There is a 
most valuable — one might say, invaluable — depart- 
ment of literature, in which the make-up, the career, 
and the influences of individuals are portrayed, and 



The Uses of History. 9 

single lives stand out in their distinctness before a 
community, so that we seem to live, and toil, and 
suffer, or conquer, with them. I am ready to own 
the pleasure and the profit I have drawn from the 
fruitful field of biography, which is the history of in- 
dividuals. There are volumes in which — as I linger 
over their pages — I seem to see, and hear, and feel 
again the touch of moral kings and conquerors, to 
live over again a portion of the past, and to get 
painted fresh and vivid elements in the picture of the 
illimitable future. But such books, though often val- 
uable contributions to History, do not constitute it. 
It has to do with men in communities, with forces 
more or less organized. It is a compliment uncon- 
sciously paid to History, when it is taken as a word 
and applied to discussions upon Mammalia, Am- 
phibia, Articulata, and Crustacea ; but History has to 
deal with men, and in masses, not accidentally, but 
naturally grouped together. Individuals indeed some- 
times, one might say often, stand out prominently, 
and are formative forces ; but you cannot look at 
them without keeping under your eye the throngs, 
between whom and them action and reaction are 
more or less distinctly visible. Constantine the Great 
cannot be rightly estimated without a careful consid- 
eration of the condition, social, political, and relig- 
ious, of the nations with which he had to do. When 
Professor Pasquale Villari would depict the man 



lo The Uses of History. 

who moved Italy, from Florence as a centre, in the 
end of the fifteenth century, he writes " Life and 
Times of Savonarola." On the other hand, we can 
not explain the conditions of things, throughout 
Christendom for centuries, without taking Constan- 
tine into account; nor can you get a just view of the 
sway of the Medicis, and the relations of France and 
Italy at that time, not to speak of great later move- 
ments, without some knowledge of Savonarola. An 
individual, however interesting personally, becomes 
" historical" only when he influences, directly or in- 
directly, the conditions of masses of his fellow-men, 
and affects their joint movements. 

This distinction is not, probably, kept in mind by 
educators. History of the great monarchies and 
empires, for popular use, are generally divided up by 
the lives, and times of reigning, of the enthroned 
magnates. I can very well remember when I en- 
tered, at the mature age of ten, on the study of 
English History, each chapter began with a portrait 
of the sovereign ; and I think most of us ignored the 
times, and thought mainly of the monarch. We 
knew when Henry II. was made master of Ireland: 
we never thought of all the causes or consequences. 
We could tell of Alfred the Great and his conflicts 
with the Danes ; but the formative forces that he set 
to work in England, and the intellectual power that 
he was, personally — even though afflicted with what 



The Uses of History. 1 1 

some have thought to have been Paul's " thorn in 
the flesh " — these ideas did not get hold of our 
minds. 

wHistory, then, is the record of facts not as things 
done and done with, but as things making or mar- 
ring, telling for good or ill, on organized masses of 
men, facts — not like pretty and interesting Koenig- 
Sees and Inter-Sees, but like the sources of the 
Rhine, or the Danube, which, though men may 
come and men may go, themselves go on forever, 
their direction indeed affected by circumstances out- 
side, with which History has also to do\ 

Take another illustration of this same point— that 
the historian has to do with lives and facts, as they 
tell on communities and coming generations — in the 
case of Mohammed. That poor posthumous child 
of a heathen man, who claimed direct descent from 
Ishmael, who was an orphan at six, who kept sheep 
for a living, and came to think himself, in conse- 
quence, in the prophetic succession of Moses and 
David — that victim of constant headache and con- 
vulsions, has personally a wonderfully interesting 
history. But who can comprehend it who does not 
know something of the moral and religious condition 
of the times, and of the lands of the Orient ? Why 
did not the Christian population hold out against 
the invader ? Had it lost the strengfth of intellieent 
conviction ? Had it ceased to be a divinely-moved 



12 The Uses of History. 

body, and become a compound of superstition and 
self-indulgence ? And here another question comes 
up : Was there any judicial authority sending punish- 
ment in the line of the sin ? For no man can, it 
seems to me, read history, uninspired History, with- 
out the suggestion of a power which — to use familiar 
language — "makes for righteousness," and in so 
doing permits ambition, passion, and the concen- 
trated forces of evil to express, and to execute, dis- 
pleasure upon nations and upon generations that 
depart from it. 

Here it is that Church History, which has all the 
features of civil history now emphasized — i.e., the 
connection of men with movements, and the character 
and influence of organizations — here the ecclesiasti- 
cal annals come in, and, more directly than in the 
department of civil history, connect movements and 
human experiences with a power above force, or law, 
or any earthly generalization. By its very constitu- 
tion the human mind cannot stop with these. It 
must ask, who originated the force ? who made the 
law ? The free activity of man furnishes materials 
for the civil historian, and he may stop there if he 
will. The Church historian, by the very nature of 
the case, must rise higher, and go deeper. He has 
more to do than tell men that such and such thines 
"happened." He has to trace the moral elements, 
their influence for good or for evil, and he is forced 



The Uses of History. 13 

to look back to their revelation, and to see and show 
how the good and the evil are regarded and treated 
in the government of Him, who is Truth, Righte- 
ousness, Holiness in His own uncreated nature, and 
who makes Himself felt in human life, and seen in 
human history. Without being a lawyer, one can 
relish one of the most thoughtful of books — Maine's 
" Ancient Law," and none the less because of the 
fitting introduction by our own Professor Dwight. 
Themis, he shows, became in the later Greek 
pantheon, the goddess of Justice, but this is "a 
modern and much developed idea." The Themis 
of Homer is the assessor of Zeus. Sustained and 
regularly recurring action men could only explain by 
a personal agent. Wind blowing, sun rising and 
setting, earth bearing crops — all such were linked 
with personal agency. Zeus is not a law-maker, but 
a judge. But we have a light that Homer had not. 
We know of One who is the fountain, as He is the 
vindicator, of law. To Him the Church historian 
must constantly point in view of causes and effects, 
of wrong and judgment, and of merciful deliver- 
ance : " The Lord is our Judge ; the Lord is our 
Lawgiver ; the Lord is our King. He will save 
us. 

Having thus outlined history as it is, we are pre- 
pared to raise the question of its uses — not indeed of 
all of them, but of such as we fittingly look at while 



14 The Uses of History. 

celebrating the eighty-fifth anniversary of this His- 
torical Society. 

An agreeable Scottish essayist has given a pleas- 
ant picture of what he calls the "parochial mind." 
It has always known just how things were done in 
its parish, and it always knew that they were done 
in the best way. It never knew how they were done 
in other parishes. Any variation from the methods 
of its own parish it regarded as obvious mistakes. 
Wise modification, alteration, or adaptation to new 
conditions it naturally disliked, and methods pursued 
elsewhere, if hinted at, were condemned at first sight : 
they were not the familiar, perfect, venerated methods 
pursued in its parish. Probably some of us have 
seen specimens of this parochial mind. It might be 
modified in time by local changes. Carry it into 
other places, let it have time to observe, weigh, com- 
pare, and allow for circumstances. Not perhaps in 
one lifetime, but at length, it may come to say : 
" We used to do thus and so, and I thought the 
course could not be changed for the better. But 
after living here a lifetime I admit that some im- 
provements were possible." When, according to a 
history which does not tax the brain seriously, the 
Dutchman moved over from the rocks of Manhattan 
Island, where he could not drive piles for the founda- 
tions of his dwelling, as he used to do in Holland, 
and selected Communipaw, where the pile-driving 



The Uses of History, 15 

was possible, he unconsciously illustrated the solid, 
conservative, parochial mind. 

But is there not a weakness corresponding- to this, 
where the boundary line is not one of space but of 
time ? Are we not tempted, now and then, to think 
our times unique, matchless, unparalleled? Do we 
not indulge a little self-complacency as a generation ? 
Have we not magnified this nineteenth century at 
times, because we know it better dian any other ? 
We can point to triumphs, in certain lines, of which 
our forefathers were ignorant. They did not scatter 
gossip over the world by electricity, nor travel in 
vestibule-trains. But our forefathers, in comparing 
themselves with their precursors, felt just as we do, 
and sometimes talked exactly as we do. Let us look 
beyond the limits of our land and our century. Let 
us allow for all that we inherit, in germ, or in fruit, 
from our predecessors ; let us comprehend the diffi- 
culties which they swept out of our way, and the 
facilities thus given to us, and we shall gain in 
modesty of estimate of our times. The tower of 
Eiffel is a very remarkable production, but it will be 
less remembered probably, and less conspicuous, in 
a thousand years, than is the " Great Pyramid " to- 
day. Sir J. W. Dawson, in his recent book, describes 
it as " a miracle of masonry in the construction of its 
internal passages and chambers, the accurate levelling 
and measurement of its sides, the perfection of its 



1 6 The Uses of History. 

form, and the beautiful fitting of its external casing." 
Kufu, or Cheops, is not so well known to-day as 
M. Eiffel, and he only built to the height of four 
hundred and eighty-two feet ; but his monument 
stands, and is likely to survive modern iron-work. 

Do we not make unconscious confessions of the 
truth that our age is, in essentials, like its predeces- 
sors and by no means perfect ? Why study Plato ? 
Why find models of eloquence in Demosthenes and 
Cicero ? Or, coming down later, where do we 
search for models in art, in architecture, even to 
some extent in dress ? Making all allowance for 
the childish folly that sometimes stamps a thing as 
necessarily superior because it is old, or because it 
comes from the ends of the earth, we must, if we 
study history candidly, deny ourselves, as a genera- 
tion, the monopoly of genius and triumphant mastery 
over the forces of nature. On the way to Chicago, 
the other day, I said to a man on the other side of 
my dining-table, " We get out more comfortably than 
did the first settlers in Chicago." " Yes," said he, 
modestly, " it took me twenty-one days to go to it 
the first time." I respected him, and I did not men- 
tally compliment myself as a traveller any more. 
And just so, if this lauded nineteenth century calmly 
confers with some of its predecessors, it will modify 
its estimate of itself. 

So, in the next place, History helps us to connect 



The Uses of History. 1 7 

causes and effects. Mere sequence is, too often, the 
only element taken into account. The cock crew in 
the early dawn. Soon after the sun rose. Was it 
the crowing of the cock that brought out the sun ? 
Or was the approach of the sun to the horizon the 
inspiration of the morning music } The illustration 
is familiar and suggests the point — the too easy con- 
tentment with the relations in time between event 
and event. Such a man made the times, we some- 
times hastily conclude, when it would be more true 
to the truth of things to say that the times made the 
man. 

The knowledge gained in this way can be, in cer- 
tain conditions, eminently practical. Here are cer- 
tain forces at work. They are credited with such 
and such results in the past ; may we expect the 
same from them in the present ? The accurate his-, 
torian has to determine the exact relationship be- 
tween the groups of facts. " Republicanism ! Why, 
it was tried by English people under a man as great 
as Cromwell, and it went down. So it will do 
again." So it has been, more or less formally, 
stated many times in the last century and a quarter. 
But let the historian tell us : Did its inherent weak- 
ness, or did some other cause, produce the downfall ? 
What were the real causes why republics have, 
again and again, given place to monarchs more or 
less limited or absolute ? Were they elements in-- 



1 8 The Uses of History. 

herent in the free popular government, essential 
parts of it, or were they adventitious circumstances 
— parasites, that fastened themselves upon it and 
sucked out its life ? The tree died — was it from fail- 
ure in its own hold of the soil, or was it from the 
creeping ivy that stuck to it, climbed by it, at length 
shut out air and sun, and killed it, and then throve 
for a while on the dead stem and branches ? Here 
it is that the historian has to aim at exactness and 
accuracy, and here it is that the reader also has to 
discriminate between accidents and mere coinci- 
dences on the one hand, and inherent and abiding 
forces on the other. 

For, in the next place. History does good service 
in illustrating the working out of principles, " The 
thing that hath been, it is that which shall be ; and 
that which is done is that which shall be done ; 
and there is no new thing under the sun." This 
comes to us from high authority, and, rightly un- 
derstood, it is a most suggestive generalization. 
It does not mean that new facts and new combi- 
nations are out of the question. It does mean that, 
objectively, natural laws and the phenomena that 
express them are abiding, and that, subjectively, 
the rational creatures that are working with, and 
through, them have the same distinctive features. 
It is suggestive that Seneca in his " Epistles," 
Tacitus in his " Annals," and " Marcus Aurelius," 



The Uses of History. 19 

make statements quite as strong on the same line. 
In fact it is difficult to avoid the inference that 
Seneca had had the Hebrew axiom before his 
mind, so like to it are his thoughts and words. 

All men of sense know the value of experience. 
A plausible project is outlined. A man is found 
who is trusted, and who can say : " I have gone 
through that, I have tried it." His opinion is 
worth much. Now, history gives the experience 
of ages, of communities, of races. It helps to the 
estimate of abstract propositions, and to the com- 
prehension of practical principles. In all ages of 
which we know anything, there have been direc- 
tors of their fellow-men, more or less disinterested, 
who claimed that they had their knowledge from 
the dead. Our English-speaking portion of this 
century has had more or less of this volunteered 
instruction — with what influence on our progress 
history will probably indicate. Now, nearly every 
intellectual, and even spiritual, fraud is a travesty 
of something genuine and good. There is a deep 
true sense in which we are to learn from the dead. 
The later we come in the progress of the race, 
the wider is our lesson-book. There is, according 
to an often quoted saying, a " permitted necro- 
mancy of the wise." To many spiritualism is a 
new thing ; but divination by means of the dead 
is not new. To say nothing of its coarser form. 



20 The Uses of History. 

when omens were sought from the post-mortem 
examination of bodies, and that by the most ex- 
alted men of their time, the seeking of hght from 
the recalled spirits of men is frequently alluded 
to by Justin, Clemens Romanus, and Tertullian. 
From the sixth century downward, this process of 
light-seeking had not much repute. We do not 
expect anything from it, but there is a real way 
in which we can interrogate the departed, question 
the centuries, and through the testimony of his- 
torians set light on present problems. 

Here again, of course, we have to be sure of our 
History. Few brighter men have figured in this 
generation than Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, who 
once made a point about Puritanism, and backed it 
up by the statement, that by the laws of Connecticut 
it " was criminal for a mother to kiss her infant on 
the Sabbath-day." He cited as his authority Peters's 
"History of Connecticut," 1781, and Captain Mar- 
yatt's "Diary, Blue Code," of which the author had 
kindly given him a copy. He did not investigate 
the value of Peters's book. And yet it is not won- 
derful. A well-educated Connecticut lady gravely 
told me that the laws of that State once made it il- 
legal for a man to kiss his wife on the holy day or 
on a fast day ; and she sincerely believed it. I need 
not enlarge on the varieties, comic and tragic, of 
illustrations of this sort that might be compiled. 



The Uses of History. 2 1 

Anyone desiring- to see through the specimen ad- 
duced can do it by a perusal of the quite interesting 
and instructive book on the " True Blue Laws of 
Connecticut and New Haven," by J. Hammond 
Trumbull, in which he will find the biography of the 
clerical historian, Dr. Peters, and abundant proof 
that Old England was not more enlightened on these 
nice points of casuistry — on which Connecticut did 
legislate — than her Colonial children. No more in- 
teresting and convincing illustration can be found of 
the principle that the historian has, first of all, to do 
with, facts, and that he is to be measured, in a great 
degree, by his trustworthiness in that line, than these 
widely spread, and widely believed, caricatures on 
New England life, furnish. I read a little history in 
school and college on the other side of the ocean, 
and I am free to confess that, until I lived on this 
side, I knew nothing to the contrary of statements 
and magazine articles in the line of Bishop Wilber- 
force's declaration. We need to get facts, facts as 
they were. It is perhaps suggestive, that our pains- 
taking German scholars call history Geschiclite — the 
things that happened. We English-speaking people, 
according even to Macaulay, make it a compound of 
poetry and philosophy, and count that its ideal per- 
fection ("Essay on Hallam's Constitutional His- 
tory"). Dr. John De Witt, in applying the distinc- 
tion to Church historians of the two kinds, describes 



2 2 The Uses of History, 

the English as, primarily, a belles lettres product, 
the product of the art of narrative ; and he adduces 
Dean Milman as an illustration of it ; while Neander 
stands, in his judgment, on the distinctive German 
line. The point we make is that History helps to a 
judgment upon the working out of ideas, sentiments, 
and principles good or bad, right or wrong ; but that, 
in order to a just judgment, we must get the actual 
facts as they are, and not as they are grouped, 
twisted, and decorated by a poet, a sentimentalist, 
or a controversialist. 

Hardly a distinct use from the foregoing, but 
almost another side of it, is the place that History 
can secure, incidentally, in the support of moral and 
kindred truth. In that volume which has shaped so 
largely our civilization, what a large portion is de- 
voted to History ! Moses, Joshua, Ezra, and others 
whose names are not emphasized, give us a multipli- 
city ot details reaching far back and covering a wide 
area. Why should it be so in a work meant to pro- 
mote the ethical and spiritual welfare of mankind ? 
The answer that is obvious to all is : that facts are 
looked at and remembered when abstract statements 
are passed by or forgotten. The lessons of sacred 
biography are fitted for individuals, and those of na- 
tional life for kingdoms and their rulers. But the 
point now to be touched is quite on another line. 
The writer of the Pentateuch goes into minute de- 



The Uses of History. 23 

tails of the march of the IsraeHtes from Egypt, over 
a region, for obvious reasons, little traversed by 
tourists, and in which names, and even surface phys- 
ical features have naturally changed in the many 
generations since Moses' time. But the British Ord- 
nance Survey has brought the material appliances in 
its hand to bear on the questions raised, " by sub- 
jecting the rugged heights of the peninsula to the 
unreasoning, though logical, tests of the theodolite 
and land-chain, of altitude and azimuth compasses, 
of the photographic camera, and the unerring 
evidence of the pole star and the sun." What has 
been the result ? Here is Sir J. W. Dawson's sum- 
mary of it: (i) "The correspondence of the re- 
corded route of the Israelites with the topography 
and geology of the country ; (2) the site of the bat- 
tle of Rephidim, and the mutiny of Moses and Je- 
thro ; (3) the Mountain of the Law, and the plain 
before it." What human mind will not be apt to 
reason in this way : Thirty centuries after Moses 
wrote his account of this long and complicated jour- 
ney, with its many places with hard names and hard 
conditions, a body of ordnance surveyors went over 
the ground, with the history, and the many discus- 
sions it raised, in one hand, and their instruments in 
the other ; and they verify Moses through and 
through. He told the truth, the literal truth in his 
history, geography, and physics. I cannot but be- 



24 The Uses of History. 

Heve that he tells the truth all through ; and I am 
prepared to trust him in all else that he has left on 
record." And then comes the appeal from the lips of 
a greater than Moses, made to descendants of the 
desert-wanderers, and applying to us all, " If ye be- 
lieve Moses ye will also believe in me, for he wrote 
me. 

It would be easy to carry you over other parallel 
lines, and to bring out and illustrate other high 
purposes that History can serve, in holding up the 
unity of the race, the fixedness of great dominant 
principles, the continuity of great moral laws, and so 
teaching men — in communities and in races, by the 
record of experiments made on the largest scale, 
and in the most varied conditions — what they 
should aim at and love, and what they should turn 
from and abhor. The origin of communities great 
in numbers, like the Roman Empire, or great in in- 
fluence, like Athens, with only its 400,000 people ; 
the wars of nations, the treaties of nations, the shift- 
ing boundaries of nations, the internal machinery of 
nations — all these, and many other classes of facts, 
gathered, described truly, and put in their right 
relations to one another, and leading up to the 
philosophy of history, and preparing the mind to ex- 
plain in part the rise, the decline, and the fall of 
empires — these are the matters with which History 
deals, and in treating them holds up object-lessons 



The Uses of History. 25 

— the grandest and the most impressive — to the 
human race. There is something recorded of Wash- 
ington — not so widely known as the incident of his 
hatchet, but quite as instructive. When the organi- 
zation of the United States was being discussed, he 
drew up a hst of all the most notable confederacies 
of states known to the world, that, by the study of the 
constitution and records of each, he might get light 
as to the best constitution for his own land, when 
it was passing from the thirteen Colonies into the 
United States. It was the practical assertion of the 
fact that the ages that are gone give us precedents, 
warninofs, and positive instructions on the matters 
affectinof common life and national welfare. 

''Ah ! but," says someone, " I am not a leader 
of men, not a formative force ; I am not making 
history ; I am not even a politician. Of what practical 
use is all this to me ? " This is the last point to be 
touched, and it can be treated concisely. The human 
mind is not a box of tools, like that which the carpen- 
ter carries about, each separate from the rest, and 
with its own distinct work. The human mind is a 
unit — a living organism, with various powers, now 
remembering, now judging, now feeling, now admir- 
ing, now making new combinations. It has memory, 
imagination, judgment, emotions, variously described 
by the students of metaphysics. You cannot keep 
one power at work without stimulating and, in some 



26 The Uses of History, 

degree, exercising the rest. Recall to me a heroic 
deed : my admiration is roused. Paint a horrid 
crime : indignation is called out. Describe a delicate 
critical situation, where wisdom is needed : the 
judgment is exercised. And all this is good for the 
mind, promotive of its health and its activity, and a 
check on any tendency to indolence or torpor. Does 
it not follow that History may be very useful to ^^'ou, 
even though you have no ambition to administer 
Brazil, or even to be governor of your own State ? 
Fiction is artificial biography, or history. How 
many realize its charms ! Truth — historic truth — is, 
if not stranger, purer and better, than fiction, and 
makes good, nutritious, and, to a healthy mind, not 
insipid, but savory, pabulum. 

Or, to put it in another form, if Bacon's division 
of knowledge or learning be correct — namely. His- 
tory dealing with the memory, philosophy with 
the understanding, and poetry exercising the im- 
agination, you have a province for History in the 
ordinary development of your mind. It supplies 
the facts to which philosophy has to turn, and on 
which the understanding works. It presents the 
sides of men and of things with which fancy oc- 
cupies itself. Homer dealt with the Trojan war ; 
Virgil depicted the career of ^neas ; Shakespeare's 
historical plays are not the least attractive of his 
works. So, if you look no higher than mental 



The Uses of History. 27 

health and culture, history has a place for you, 
and will aid in the several forms of intellectual 
activity. But one would safely, I think, go far- 
ther than Bacon. There is a field in which another 
mental power — call it " conscience," call it " moral 
sense " — has to work, and History is constantly 
brino-ino- to it what will exercise and employ it. 
The tenderness of pity, the unselfishness of be- 
nevolence, the vigor of just sentiment, the admir- 
ation of goodness, the reverence of the divine as 
it pervades all like an atmosphere — these inner 
movements are called out by the revelations given 
in the annals of the past. They lead to the healthy 
exercise of these constituents of our being, and in 
responding aright we become wiser, deeper, better, 
and— I speak it reverently — we come into closer 
sympathy with Him who notes the fall of a spar- 
row, and who is from Everlasting to Everlasting. 



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